BayesComp homepage

Today, the BayesComp section of ISBA launched its website. It is organised as a wiki and members of the section are strongly incited to take part into the construction of the website. To quote from Peter Green’s introduction:

This new Wikidot site aims to be a community-edited resource on all aspects of Bayesian computation, available for all to read; here ‘community’ means members of the section – we hope that interested members will help us create pages of information and advice to help disseminate new research ideas in an accessible way, and promote good practice. Members can also submit links to a directory of papers, slides, videos and software, and to a diary of upcoming events such as conferences and workshops, all through easy-to-use forms.

Please visit BayesComp, read the Quick Start Guide there, actively contribute to the site’s content, and let us have feedback using the blog facility provided. Once you have editing credentials on the site, you do not need permission to make edits, just do it! Section officers may tidy things up later, if no one else does, but we won’t delete anything unless it is offensive or plainly wrong.

Thanks to the inputs of Peter Green and of Nicolas Chopin, this could be a wonderful exchange tool for the community, but only if this community strives to keep it alive!

in praise of the referee (or not)

While I was editing our “famous” In praise of the referee paper—well, famous for being my most rejected paper ever!, with one editor not even acknowledging receipt!!—for the next edition of the ISBA Bulletin—where it truly belongs, being in fine a reply to Larry’s tribune therein a while ago—, Dimitris Politis had written a column for the IMS Bulletin—March 2013 Issue, page 11—on Refereeing and psychoanalysis.

Uh?! What?! Psychoanalysis?! Dimitris’ post is about referees being rude or abusive in their report, expressing befuddlement at seeing such behaviour in a scientific review. If one sets aside cases of personal and ideological antagonisms—always likely to occur in academic circles!—, a “good” reason for referees to get aggressively annoyed to the point of rudeness is sloppiness of one kind or another in the paper under review. One has to remember that refereeing is done for free and with no clear recognition in the overwhelming majority of cases, out of a sense of duty to the community and of fairness for having our own papers refereed. Reading a paper where typos abound, where style is so abstruse as to hide the purpose of the work, where the literature is so poorly referenced as to make one doubts the author(s) ever read another paper, the referee may feel vindicated by venting his/her frustration at wasting one’s time by writing a few vitriolic remarks.  Dimitris points out this can be very detrimental to young researchers. True, but what happened to the advisor at this stage?! Wasn’t she/he supposed to advise her/his PhD student not only in conducting innovative research but also in producing intelligible outcome and in preparing papers suited for the journal it is to be submitted to..?! Being rude and aggressive does not contribute to improve the setting, no more than headbutting an Italian football player helps in winning the World Cup, but it may nonetheless be understood without resorting to psychoanalysis!

Most interestingly, this negative aspect of refereeing—that can be curbed by posterior actions of AEs and editors—would vanish if some of our proposals were implemented, incl. making referee’ reports part of the referee’s publication list, making those reports public as comments on the published paper (if published), and creating repositories or report commons independent from journals…

ISBA on INLA [webinar]

If you have missed the item of information, Håvard Rue is giving an ISBA webinar tomorrow on INLA:

the ISBA Webinar on INLA is scheduled for April 4th, 2013
from 8:30 - 12:30 EDT.

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To join the online meeting (Now from mobile devices using the Cisco WebEx
Meeting App)
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1. Go to  https://www.webex.com/login/attend-a-meeting
2. Enter the meeting number  730 293 070 and click Join Now
3. Enter your name and email address, the meeting password and
click "Join Now"

A recording of the webinar will be provided shortly after the event.

Please verify that your computer is capable of connecting using WebEx at

https://support.webex.com/MyAccountWeb/systemRequirement.do?root=Tools&parent=System

or see https://www.webex.com/login/join-meeting-tips  if you are having
trouble connecting.

Bayes 250 in Durham

Reproducing an email from ISBA (sorry about the confusion purposely created by the title, this is Durham, North Carolina, not Durham, England, just as the London in Bayes 250 in London was London, England, not London, Ontario!):

ISBA announces a special celebration of the 250th anniversary of the presentation (December 23, 1763) of Thomas Bayes’ seminal paper “An Essay towards solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances” that will be held at Duke University in conjunction with the O-Bayes 13 Workshop (December 15-19) and EFab@ Bayes250 Workshop (December 15-17). (I am part of the scientific committee for O-Bayes 13!)

Speakers for the anniversary celebration are legendary contributors to the Bayesian literature, spanning a range of fields:

• Stephen Fienberg, Carnegie-Mellon University
• Michael Jordan, University of California, Berkeley
• Christopher Sims, Princeton University
• Adrian Smith, University of London
• Stephen Stigler, University of Chicago

There will be a banquet in the evening, with a speech by Sharon Bertsch McGrayne, noted author of the popular book “The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes’ Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines and Emerged Triumphant From Two Centuries of Controversy.”

abstract for “Bayes’ Theorem: then and now”

Here is my abstract for the invited talk I will give at EMS 2013 in Budapest this summer (the first two banners were sites of EMS 2013 conferences as well, which came above the European Meeting of Statisticians on a Google search for EMS 2013):

What is now called Bayes’ Theorem was published and maybe mostly written by Richard Price in 1763, 250 ago. It was re-discovered independently (?) in 1773 by Pierre Laplace, who put it to good use for solving statistical problems, launching what was then called inverse probability and now goes under the name of Bayesian statistics. The talk will cover some historical developments of Bayesian statistics, focussing on the controversies and disputes that marked and stil mark its evolution over those 250 years, up to now. It will in particular address some arguments about prior distributions made by John Maynard Keynes and Harold Jeffreys, as well as divergences about the nature of testing by Dennis Lindley, James Berger, and current science philosophers like Deborah Mayo and Aris Spanos, and misunderstandings on Bayesian computational issues, including those about approximate Bayesian computations (ABC).

I was kindly asked by the scientific committee of EMS 2013 to give a talk on Bayes’ theorem: then and now, which suited me very well for several reasons: first, I was quite interested in giving an historical overview, capitalising on earlier papers about Jeffreys‘ and Keynes‘ books, my current re-analysis of the Jeffreys-Lindley’s paradox, and exchanges around the nature of Bayesian inference. (As you may guess from the contents of the abstract, even borrowing from the article about Price in Significance!) Second, the quality of the programme is definitely justifying attending the whole conference. And not only for meeting again with many friends. At last, I have never visited Hungary and this is a perfect opportunity for starting my summer break there!